All Religions Are the Same – Debunked (All Religions are True – Refuted)

Have you ever been told that “all religions
are basically the same”, that “all religions basically teach the same thing”, or that
“all religions are equally true”? If so, then I know your pain… and if not,
then rest assured, for in time some well-intentioned liberal douche will throw one of these assertions
in your face… This, is “All Religions are the Same – Debunked”. The vacuous assertion that “all religions
are the same” comes in many forms and from many types of people, but it would be remiss
of me not to emphasis that it’s a particular favorite among those who describe themselves
as “peaceful”. To name but a few examples, Mahatma Gandhi
once said, “The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different”; the
14th Dalai Lama once said, “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message,
that is love, compassion and forgiveness”; and Muhammad Ali once said, “Religions all
have different names, but they all contain the same truths”. Now these assertions are utopian, all effectively
calling for peace – which is nice and all, but are they true? In fact, is it even possible that they’re
true? The answer is a resounding no! Not unless you define every religion to be
exactly the same, which, and to raise a first flaw, is precisely what many proponents of
these arguments do. They literally define all religions, such
as Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism, to be, “The belief in and worship of a superhuman
controlling power”, which, to put this into perspective, is the equivalent of defining
all sports, such as Ice Hockey, Rugby and Table Tennis, to be, “An activity involving
physical exertion and skill”. Sure, all sports technically fit this definition,
but to say that this definition accurately describes the essence of every sport is nonsense… Just as the paddles, ball, table and net are
the essence of Table Tennis, God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and Original Sin are the essence
of Christianity, and hence, those who insist on defining all religions to be exactly the
same are either being disingenuous, deliberately obtuse, or outrageously ignorant! And this brings us comfortably to the most
devastating flaw that the proponents of these arguments commit… by defining all religions
to be exactly the same, they completely ignore the fact that the essence of all religions
are mutually exclusive. That is, they fail to acknowledge that religions
make incompatible claims about how and when the universe was created, what rules and regulations
humans must abide by, which texts, objects and/or locations are sacred, who are and were
prophets, and when and where to have faith… To illustrate this through another example,
imagine if you will, that three people enter a room and see an apple lying upon the ground. The first person asserts that the apple is
green and that it’s big; the second person asserts that the apple is red and that it’s
small; and the third person asserts that the apple is purple, invisible, and that it cares
deeply about who you sleep with and in what position… Needless to say, in this scenario all three
people can’t all be correct… the essence of their claims is incompatible with one-another. The apple is either green and big, red and
small, purple and invisible, or none of the above. That is the only possibilities – they can’t
all be true! But now imagine that a fourth person enters
the room and says, “Hey people, the essence of your beliefs are basically the same”,
or that “All of your beliefs basically carry the same message”, or that “All of your
beliefs have different names, but they all contain the same truths”, how exactly would
the other three people react? They would likely and rightfully conclude
that the fourth person was either being disingenuous, deliberately obtuse, or outrageously ignorant! And exactly the same goes for those who assert
that all religions are the same… religions make mutually exclusive claims about reality,
and therefore they can’t all be correct. Now my friends, I’ve got a real treat for
you… here’s John, otherwise known as the Godless
Engineer, to weigh on this subject – take it away my friend! Well thank you Stephen, I really appreciate
you allowing me to talk about my view on this particular topic. I feel that stating all religions are the
same is a rather myopic view. Each religion has it’s own brand of crazy
that goes with it; On the side of social acceptable religions you have a wide range of bat-shit
crazy. First of, in a broad sense, let’s start
with the three major religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. While they do have a lot of similar attributes,
like misogyny and genocide, each one of them have their own practices and implementations. While Christ is seen by the Christians as
the savior of all of mankind, Judaism says “nope, the savior hasn’t come yet”,
while Islam is out there, and it’s just like “$#@! you guys, the prophet Muhammad
is the thing”. Islam has very specific verses on how and
when you can beat the living shit out of your wife and/or concubine, whereas Judaism Christianity
just puts the breaks on it by just treating them like, you know, lower beings. Being able to identify between these three
types of religions I think is very important for society, and it could be quite dangerous
by lumping them all in together. Now, not only do they differ in a broad sense,
but they also diverge on an individual level. While most Americans see Muslims as things
that just go boom, they actually differ in their own religion as to their beliefs and
their practices. Sunni and Shia Muslims are both the same in
regards to the basic tenants to Islam, but they do differ on where they derive some of
their beliefs. Sunni Muslims actually rely on the prophet
and his lifetime and his practices, in order to guide them in how they should implement
their religion. While the Shia Muslims actually see their
ayatollahs as reflections of god on earth. This causes a vast difference in how they
believe in their religion, and in how they practice their religion. Keep in mind that on each side of the Muslims
here, we have varying degrees of adherence to their own religion. If I tried to cover the vast amount of differences
between each individual denomination of Christian we would be here way longer than you want
to be. Also another thing is that most people are
well versed in what Christians believe. You’ve got Catholics that think that they
literally drink the blood and eat the flesh of Jesus Christ every Sunday. Pentecostals think that if god wills it he’ll
protect their $#@! from snakebites… Baptists, they were at the heart of the whole
slavery and equal rights for African Americans issue, you know, on the bad side of history! The opposite side; the incorrect side of history,
for a long time. Of course, now they regretfully admit that
they were on the wrong side, but, they did change with society. And then you’ve got some Mormons that think
that Bigfoot is actually Cain… The point is that they all have bat-$#@ crazy
beliefs, and it’s important for you to know who believes which bat-$#@ crazy thing. Thank you Stephen for allowing me to grace
your channel with my foul-mouthed presence, I hope that you guys will join me over on
the Godless Engineer channel, and now I’m going to hand it back on over to Stephen. Bye y’all! Cheers John – you’re awesome as always! Needless to say, if you enjoyed John’s style
and what he had to say, I’d highly recommend checking out his channel, his videos are always
humorous and entertaining… and, he’s obviously a really cool guy, because despite me recently
loosing my entire channel, he insisted that we still collaborate, which, needless to say,
is extremely kind of him – and so please, do check his channel out and give him a bit
of love! Anyhow, to recap, the arguments that “all
religions are basically the same”, that “all religions basically teach the same
thing”, or that “all religions are equally true” are flawed because; They use incorrect
and disingenuous definitions; They completely ignore the mutual exclusivity of religious
claims, and; Thank you kindly for the view, and I’ll leave you with an elegant quote
from HardFastMedia’s recent article on this very subject, “Each of the major mythological
traditions of the world represents a special framework for looking at the world and human
beings’ place within it.” They can’t all be correct. Anyhow, until next time my fellow apes! Until next time.

100 thoughts on “All Religions Are the Same – Debunked (All Religions are True – Refuted)”

Hey all, if you enjoyed what the Godless Engineer had to say within this video then please do check out his channel. It was a pleasure to work with him! https://www.youtube.com/user/godlessengineer/videos

I'm pretty sure what is meant by liberals, such as myself, when they say all religions are the same, is not that they are literally the same, but that they all contain tenants which are admirable, and others which are deplorable, and individual followers choose which ones to follow & practice. While it is true that, globally, the percentage of Muslims who do violent things in the name of religion is higher than the percentage of Christians who do, it is not because the Quran is uniquely evil. In fact, the bible contains many verses demanding that places of worship to other gods be burned down, that rumors of nonbelievers in a town must be verified, and if true, everyone in the town must be killed, including the livestock, and the town must be burned down and the land salted such that nothing would ever grow. If by chance it was the US that was Muslim & the middle east which was Christian, the US with its wealth, resource abundance, technological development & localized peace would still be quite progressive, and the middle east, with its resource scarcity, low rates of education, incessant war to justify America's ridiculously high military budget, would still be quite violent, and the hypothetical Muslim US would decry Christianity for its apparent tendency to produce such violent people as we see in the middle east, citing the very verses I referenced earlier. I recognize religions have different rules, practices, gods, prophets, numbers of gods in some cases, etc. But to the extent that legislation & foreign policy should be concerned, religions are the same. If one wants to prevent the importation of criminals, perhaps regulate immigration on the basis of criminal history, not the nebulous label with which one identifies themselves, and has little to no correlation on their ethics. By virtue of being born in one country or another, you will likely identify as whatever is locally most common, but, as you yourself indicated, there's a tremendous diversity of belief within each religion. Not just between denominations, but even within them. There are varying levels of religiosity, of familiarity with the text, of application of the text, of literal or metaphorical interpretation; perhaps it would be more accurate to say, rather than all religions are the same, is that all people are different. Whether they share a label or not will not tell you much about a person. The thesis, I suppose, is that you cannot legislate people in groups which are largely arbitrarily defined. Either treat everyone the same, or treat them all as individualism. Treating large swaths of people as monoliths is an intellectually lazy & fallacious exercise that will undoubtedly result in the unjust treatment of many.

It is true that none of the three questions you posed are true but the one statement about all the religions that is true is that they are all the same in their purpose, which is that they are all tools that races use to survive as races. the reason that all religions describe how you should act is what makes them essentially the same in their purpose. So once you understand that you can put the questions above into a deeper context. "all religions are basically the same", well sure, they're all out to do the same things for the people who designed them. "all religions basically teach the same thing", well, sure, they all teach that if you don't follow a moral framework you don't survive or achieve happiness. And "all religions are equally true" as in if it works for the purpose of helping a people then there is something true about them in a Darwinian sense, not in a literal sense, but in the same way that if you press the button on the remote control and it turns the channel there is something true about quantum theory, there is also something true about all of the religions because the effect is of benefit to those who adhere to it. If it has detrimental effects to those who don't adhere to it but to something similar than it must be because there is something true-er about the religion that won as opposed to the one that lost. The god of the Abrahamic religions is a conservative god, a far right god- now for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, or, god punishes, and evolution only changes as it needs to per the demands in changes in the environment and doesn't create expensive evolutionary changes if they are unnecessary, therefore, evolution is conservative, just like the Abrahamic god. The extent to which the Abrahamic god matches the behaviors which Darwin can show are pro survival is proof that the Abrahamic god is the real god, because Darwin describes rules of the material world and the Abrahamic god is a label for the unknowable force which uses it's will to describe the material world.

Basically, Stephen said that some people pretend all religion are the same because they share the same essence. He then explains that the essence of all religions are not the same because they are mutually exclusive about their claims. Since they can't be true at the same time about exclusive essential claims each of them made, all religions are absolutely not the same.

Then John came in and said "They all believe in BATSHIT crazy things !"

My go to example to show the assertion that all religions are the same is Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese end of the world cult that tried to jump start the apocalypse by releasing nerve gas in Japanese subways. They also tried to release hydrogen cyanide but that attack was foiled. They committed kidnapping, murders and when the police raided their compounds found chemicals for making nerve gas, explosives, guns and people in cells. I also use Aum Shinrikyo to show all religions are not about spreading love, which is another trope spread by some.

Religions are written artistic interpretations. All are different interpretations, but have similarities too. Religions are not supposed to be 100% "your creation for dummies" books. They are based on interpretations and leave a lot out. Just because they leave a lot out doesn't mean that they can't help people though. They are about how to live your life, not a map of how you were created to the T. A person can believe in evolution but still believe in God or the tao, for example, because their teachings hint at nature being the creator. God is not A man, he is man, as in the race. Tao is the essence of nature and God is in nature and we have nature in us. A lot of the modern teachings and leaders of religions are warped, but religion itself, at the core, is not a bad thing, it's the interpretations and sinful practicing of it that portray it wrong and use it for wrong.

It is the spirit that the religious name obeys. The churches are obeying lucifer indirectly. Muslims obey Lucifer directly. India, south korea. Japan, and china have God's spirit in tbem. Islamic people tried to wipe them out. Muslims have their sights on the usa. There are two religons. Defiled and undefiled. Look for the voice of the master who is jesus. You will see where Jesus is not when you do this. The bible is nott the problem. People are the problem. People make an assumption changing a word based on an assumption. They that do that are blind to the spirit. artie whitefox.

The 3 Abrahamic religions are probably the most similar but still quite different, yet Buddhism and Taoism both don't have gods, and you can even be an atheist Hindu, then there are religions like Shintoism which believe in spirits of inanimate objects like rain, mountains, trees etc., then there is Sikhism which is a weird blend of Islam and Hinduism, then there is Scientology which is nothing like any of the others.

Maybe there was once a single 'owners manual' for humans, encoded in their DNA. But humans extracted that manual and changed it to serve their wants and desires, thereby creating all these varying religions…

Can you do a video on how three major religions all seem to claim Jerusalem as their holiest city? ThanksAlso, is all religions being the same the same as all religions being exactly same? I don't think Ali & Ghandi were saying all religions exactly the same, but they are very similar, in that they profess love if followed properly and not hijacked by The fundamentalists? Just saying, one atheist ape to another.

I would disagree to a certain point. Dalai Lama claimed only that all religions contained certain common components, and those components aim at calming down interpersonal conflict inside a social group and make them cooperate. I find that statement too simplified and absolutist, but mostly accurate. The problem is, most religions love their exceptions. Thou shalt not kill. Except blasphemers. And homosexuals. And witches. And those who curse their parents. Etc.

Islam holds a certain ideology that when all people submit to Allah and become the nation of Islam, peace shall reign. But those who fight against this idea fight against peace and should be beaten into submission.

These statements are also a bit simplistic, so I leave it to you to make something out of it, if you wish. I'm afraid that's all the Youtube comment format allows me to do.

While you're correct, it must be said that a lot of the conflicting doctrines are blown up out of proportion by the marketers of each distinct brand of religion to differentiate from others. If you asked a representative sample of moderate lay people of various religions to rate what they think are the most important principles of their religions, you'd find surprisingly small differences. I have talked with a lot of people with a view to finding common ground, and it's very easy.

You find so much craziness because the more rancorous a fundamentalist preacher sounds like to others the more hysterical the public commentary and thus the more lucrative it is for the preacher. Few Evangelicals actually want to stone homosexuals, despite many Evangelical preachers calling for it. Even fewer want to stone you for eating shrimp, although the same verse in Leviticus commands that.

Let me remind you that I'm not really disagreeing with you, just presenting a hypothesis for how some of the crazy differences between, say, Catholics and Protestants got so bad.

All religions are selling you the same stupid bullshit (under one form or another) and all are a waste of time. This is all that is common between them. Eventually, they will become that cultural luggage such as now officially dead religions (like the Greek one) which the modern man has to carry with himself everywhere, as soon as we come up with the new bullshit that will replace them completely.

I've watched a half dozen of your vids, if not more. I find them interesting and thought provoking. But I think you fail, and do so miserably, in this instance.

You are right. Religions are not all the same. But you erred when you used the examples as you did.

I believe that you've purposefully ignored the context and message of Gandhi and the Dalai Lama in order to make your video. Their point was that there is much more that unites us as human beings. We've much more in common than not. At no point were they trying to equivocate Hinduism with Buddhism, etc. They were trying to say that all religious folk use their beliefs to give meaning to their lives, to try to diminish their sufferings and to help them live more morally.

According to you/this video, nobody would be able to have a viable conversation anymore. We'd be stuck trying to define each and every term we use. According to you, the following phrase: "Snow is so clean and cold" would also be fallacious. I'd have to say instead, "The fresh undisturbed snow fallen in a clearing on a winter's night, when the temperature is between -10°C and -15°C is so clean and cold."

Fallacious statements/arguments abound these days. It shouldn't be a struggle to find a worthy theme to discuss. This wasn't one of them.

This is a lazy debunk / refute in my opinion. You only go into the argument from your own perspective, without really diving into the other sides perspective, the one you debunk. It's interesting that some figures with enormous positive and inspiring impact that you name, came to these conclusions and people throughout time seem to do that. So, what might be a more interesting pursue is to try to see what they actually meant instead of what you assume they mean. Yes all religions are different in many ways, but what tendencies are the same that they might be point from? An interesting direction to look into is the mystic branches of religions, like sufism, jewish branches (kaballah) and many catholic preachers, but also many modern christian preachers. . They seem all to come to similar conclusions and insights again and again and again. I think not all religions are the same, but inside and also outside religions, people matter-of-factly do hit on similar deep insights that bring often life changing relevance with them, which you could even call spiritual or religious.

But isn't this a communication problem? Like, I think our fourth person with the apple example is substaining that the truth of the matter is that there's an apple there and it has a colour, and isn't that correct? That's what I understand from the generalising view, hoding that there IS a supernatural framework for reality, or basically the definition you gave for Religion in a past video; that the truth is that it exists, regardless of the specifics.

This is easier to beat with far more examples (religion being that semantic black hole) but at least with the apples, that's how I understood it.

Old Pagan didn't even seek peace per se. They where more like belief systems used to understand the nature of reality through folkloric metaphors. Like how the gods where not necessarily good or evil but subject to whim and emotion. Like how the sea (Poseidon) seemed to carry bad fortune for Odysseus but was favored by his wits (Athena). So the Odyssey is a tale about using your mental capabilities to defy the odds. Which goes in contrast to the garden of Eden where humanities greatest crime was the acquiring awareness of itself and its surroundings (the forbidden fruit).

You missed the whole point in the statement "All religions are the same." "All the religions are the same in there essence." The essence is a direct experience of God or Source, whatever you call it. With a direct experience comes the realization that: it isn't anything but a direct experience. Beneath the beliefs, rituals, and dogmas is a direct experience of spirituality that is the essence of all religions. It's probably the one thing that keeps people stuck in their beliefs, because the experience of truth is a deeply moving and grounding experience that is then identified with the beliefs. Then people think the beliefs are the cause of the experience, so they refuse to surrender the beliefs and defend them. You won your argument conceptually through the exploration of beliefs and meanings. All religions are true in their essence, and there is no doctrine or belief system that can prove or refute the essence of a spiritual experience through one's direct experience of truth. What is that direct experience? That your true nature, your essence at the core of your being is that of God or Source (pick a name but don't try to define the name, or you'll create a religion.)

"Not all religions are equally dangerous, but all religions are equally wrong." "All religions are absolutely true, and all religions are mostly wrong." My two favorite quotes, but I can't remember who said them.

If you are religious, believe in the "supernatural", gods or any other bullshit … understand that you are a truly stupid person. Understand that your children (if you have any) will adopt your stupidity, and you are responsible for retarding mankind's growth. Yes … you. You're a fuckwit.

I think it's mentally lazy from you to assume that what Gandhi or Dalai Lama said were so obviously disprovable and blatantly wrong without actually trying to see what they were trying to say. It's like taking a sentence out of a wide context of a book, then applying it to a different context and then pointing out it's so obviously false that anyone seeing it must concede that it's a falsehood. Which by itself is a fallacy by the by.

Wow…i love your channel, but i think youbare taking this a bit out of context.

Im a car guy and when people say cars are cars i ki da get upset, but i see there general purpose of describing them this way. They get you from point a to b and so forth and so on. That doesnt mean i have to go on a dissertation about how the radar gamuided cruise control in a kia is soooooo much different then that of a bmw. They are not going to care.

People being this obtuse are attempting, in my mi d, to diffuse situations and atrempting to get people to look at how we are alike and not focus on the differences.

I mean really, are you gonna sit there and purposely argue with fucking ghandi? Lol

I think you are taking this idea a bit too seriously. I think you are getting caught up in the denotative meaning of such colloquialisms but if spoken in a more deliberate way I think the sensibility trying to be conveyed would be "Most humans share similar moral values and use their religious beliefs as a vehicle for those values"

I actually felt sorry for the godless engineer when he was on The Distributist that one time and did actually get dicked around. I could tell back then that he was on that seemingly oxymoronic mission, a proselytizing atheist crusade; but didn’t know he was on a feminist crusade as well. It seems there’s a whole aggregate of such, and they wannabe, or wanted to be an Organization; specifically an ally of Feminism, an auxiliary arm of the ideology that really counts.

No, not all religions are the same, and currently Islam is the worst. There would have been a time that catholicism was the worst, because of how the church sponsored about every fascist dictatorship on the planet. Now however, Islam is currently the main threat, with a large number of states, armies and oil at hand.

It seems you are being deliberately obtuse here in conflating "essence" with "true". Moreover, your analysis of "essence" is outrageously ignorant. The essence of rugby, football, and basketball are the same: activity designed to exercise teamwork toward a specific goal in a fun and repeatable manner. The whole point of the word "essence" is to distend with specifics.

The essence of these faiths is to unite humanity in service of a higher design. I'm fully with you that their truth claims are incompatible, but to say that they don't have the same essence (especially the Abrahamic faiths) is, how can I put this mildly… dipshit retarded.

This criticism is meant with great appreciation for your work (which is usually much better analyzed than this trash). Keep it up!

What people like the Dalai Lama mean is that when you scratch the surface of religion and go to the core, there are the same fundamental essences such as the golden rule. What happens thereafter is another matter entirely. It's more of a plea to strip away the layers that were piled on and distorted the truths that all humans share. Your channel is one of the greatest out there, but I think you missed the mark on this one a bit.

If you go through William Blake's short writings, "There Is No Natural Religion", and "All Religions Are One", he provides a sketch at the poetics of religion in general, and he makes, to my perspective, a very enlightening point. Mind you, he was a poet. And a highly intelligent one.

I agree with the overall point of this video, but I have a bit of a philosophical curiosity with the Apple analogy.Given color blindness, color can be subjective. Additionally size can be subjective. Somebody who has only ever seen very large apples may call this one small, and vice versa.In this case, would the first two descriptions actually be mutually exclusive, given the differences are only subjective?

I don't know if having things in common would make the case for the existence of an essence of religion, but they all have in common the idea that people get rewarded or punished according to their behavior.

When you asked if I ever heard the phrase "all religions are the same" I thought "wait a second.. I say that"… but what I mean by that is "all religions are equally UNtrue". I mean, it'd probably be easier for me to believe in Christianity rather than in a private cult asserting that a piece of swiss cheese is what created the Universe… but you get the point 🙂

but sorry to say ! do to way people practice religion does not mean religions are not the same just means the way people see that religion are diff and i do have to say i have seen everyone of your vids are agree with them but this one

All religions are the same, they're all inventions of fascist governance for social and economic control of the people. Think this, do that, give your consent to this because.. They're all fish tales about fishtailed gods.

Mahatma Gandhi might be logically incorrect in his statement, but the context and situation in which he told this statement were completely different. India is very diverse country with many religions, languages, cultures etc.While forming such a diverse nation, the first task for him was to unite all the religions. He succeeded in it, he brought a sense of brotherhood between people from every religion.

i like watching your videos and i agree that all religions are different with different agendas, but there are some points you are missing. Hinduism or Buddhism are NOT religions, there are either Civilization or way of life, westerners called them religions. there always used to be a reason behind when Gandhi used to make a statement, he said all religions are same, he said it for Indians while India-Pakistan partition happened and people were killing each other in the name of religion. He was quite a rational man, he knew, making real statements wouldn't have helped that situation, during so much violence. it's very important to understand history behind statement, this is why Gandhi is highly misunderstood even in India. Dalai Lama's main intention is peace and first understanding unity is important for him, his main agenda is how human minds work in similar way around the world and similar things humans desire on individual basis. and Mohammed Ali, i can't say much about him because i do not know in which context he was talking about so no comments. Next time, consider the context as well, for historical figures, that's it.